Ryegate Commons

Ryegate Commons Cohousing Community

Ryegate Commons, Ltd. aims to develop a new model for sustainable rural development that:

Preserves working farms

Serves an aging population and

Creates adaptive strategies for climate change through local food and energy production and affordable, energy efficient housing design.

We will serve the public good through programs that educate and inform the local community and the general public about our activities, including assistance in applying this model in other communities.

We are working to create a small cohousing community in Northeastern Vermont, with up to 30 households sharing ownership of two farms on 315 acres. We anticipate selling development rights on 200 acres, and are working with the Upper Valley Land Trust and the Vermont Housing Conservation Board. Our model serves as an important new method to preserve existing farms and to enable young farmers and farm families to afford to enter farming.

Our community will be multi-generational and inclusive. We are democratically organized and operate through a modified consensus decision-making process. Dwellings will be clustered on a relatively small portion of the nonagricultural land, with everyone in the community owning the land and the farm together. Individual members will own their own residences, and may or may not be actively involved with the farm.
We hope to incorporate one or more on-site renewable energy sources into the project, aimed at achieving net zero energy status and becoming part of the emerging ‘smart grid’ of energy distribution. We are also developing a comprehensive farm plan, aimed at providing a livelihood for two or more households, food and satisfying work for our members and the surrounding community, and protecting the quality of the land and its eco-community. We anticipate continuing an organic dairy operation on 62 acres and transitioning the remaining agricultural land to organic fruit and vegetable production.

The project is still in the early stages of development. Currently we have option agreements on both farms. At least ten households have signed up as potential residents for the community, with a mailing list of over a hundred names. Our membership includes experienced organic farmers, an international consultant to the organic industry, an attorney, an education professor, a retired USDA employee and a great variety of other talented folks.
The cost of home ownership at Ryegate Commons has not yet been determined. We are at work formulating the legal and financial structure of the community. We are incorporated as a non-profit in Vermont, and expect to file for tax-exempt status soon. We are actively seeking funding for our activities, and the Institute for Social Ecology currently serves as our fiscal sponsor.

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The Symbiosis Research Collective will be speaking at the ISE Annual Gathering this weekend - read their excellent prize-winning article Community, Democracy, and Mutual Aid here:

"Our aim in this essay is to channel our struggles against oppression and domination into a strategic approach toward building real utopias—to transform the poetry of Occupy into the prose of real social change. Both concrete and comprehensive, our proposal is to organize practical community institutions ofparticipatory democracy and mutual aid that can take root, grow, and gradually supplant the institutions that now rule ordinary people’s lives.

This next system we imagine is a libertarian ecosocialism grounded in the direct participation of citizens rather than the unaccountable authority of elites; in the social ownership of the economy rather than exploitation; in the equality of human beings rather than the social hierarchies of race, gender, nationality, and class; in the defense of our common home and its nonhuman inhabitants rather than unfettered environmental destruction; and in the restoration of community rather than isolation. Above all else, our aim is to lay out a framework forcrafting such a society from the ground up—to, as the Wobblies declared, build the new world in the shell of the old." ... See MoreSee Less

Our first online course Ecology, Democracy, Utopia was a great success! In response to high demand we are now offering a self-directed course featuring the same video lectures, readings, and discussion forums but without the fixed time commitment of a weekly seminar. This allows for more flexible pa...

"Bookchin was an advocate of an eclectic form of environmentalist anti-capitalism. In "Ecology of Freedom" (1982), he argued that man’s destruction of the environment is the result of his domination of other men, and only by doing away with all hierarchies – man over woman, old over young, white over black, rich over poor – could humanity avert ecological and economic collapse. In "The Rise of Urbanisation and the Decline of Citizenship" (1987) and "Urbanisation without Cities" (1992), he proposed "libertarian municipalism" as an alternative to representative democracy and authoritarian state-socialism: directly democratic assemblies would confederate into larger networks and eventually topple state power. His 24 published books had earned him admirers such as Grace Paley, Noam Chomsky and Ursula LeGuin (who based her novel "The Dispossessed" in part on Bookchin’s early work)..." ... See MoreSee Less